Despite her uncertainty, Bella held to her earlier position. She was absolutely not going near that colossal disaster called the Mines of Moria, no matter what anyone said.
"Thorin is my friend. He wants to return to the Lonely Mountain—I have to help him."
She shoved everything onto Thorin. It's not that I mean to disrespect you. Thorin won't agree.
Galadriel turned slowly. "The dragon has always been your stumbling block."
Bella replied without flinching, broadening the scope: "The dragon is a stumbling block for all intelligent life."
"Mithrandir, your stubbornness serves no purpose." Galadriel's voice was detached. "Thorin will betray you. You underestimate what the Mines of Moria mean to Dwarves." She finished speaking and seemed to drift away again, her eyes going distant and unfocused.
Elrond wore that same expression of someone confident the outcome was already decided. "Miss Mithrandir, you do not understand Dwarves."
His tone was exactly the same as Thorin's had been, not long ago, when Thorin had told her you don't understand Elves.
The meeting between Bella, Elrond, and Galadriel unfolded like so many councils do—no one arrived at any constructive solution to anything. It felt more like a formality: show up, exchange pleasantries, formally establish this so-called Council of the Three Rings, and then everyone went back to doing exactly what they'd been doing.
Bella teleported out of Lothlórien. At the forest's edge, she found the Balrog's upper half where it had fallen and, with some effort, hacked off its head.
This was evidence. Evidence of what? Evidence that she was the Balrog Slayer, obviously.
Elves, Dwarves—none of that mattered. Only strength mattered, and the Balrog fight had made that crystal clear. She had the Ancient One as a teacher now, so the knowledge that had long limited her breakthroughs—always her weak point—was, however barely, adequate. But her psionic power still had room to grow. She needed to strengthen herself—needed to harvest more admiration.
Through persistent, roundabout inquiry, she'd made a rather dispiriting discovery: Dwarves didn't consider her beautiful at all. Not even close. The only reason they'd complimented her before was because they needed something from her.
But now she'd killed the Balrog. She'd avenged ten generations of Dwarf blood debt. Surely they'd praise her sincerely now?
Humans forgot things quickly. The memory of a life saved might fade in ten years. Dwarves were different—stubborn, single-minded, and crucially, long-lived. They casually lived two or three hundred years. If every Dwarf felt genuine gratitude toward her, offering praise here and there over that lifespan, accumulated across an entire people and two or three centuries—the psionic energy that would be generated would be enormous.
Dwarves also loved to drink. When they drank, they bragged. They would go out of their way—even bringing their own rations—to taverns all over the world and loudly advertise her accomplishments. A few bellowed declarations and the whole tavern would know. Her reputation would spread at a remarkable speed.
All of that was admiration.
So she had to bring the Balrog's head back and show Thorin.
There was a deeper reason too. She was an outsider. She couldn't make decisions on Thorin's behalf. If Thorin's company learned the Balrog was dead and decided they wanted to return to the Mines of Moria themselves, she had very little standing to stop them.
If the Elves agreed, the Dwarves agreed, even Rohan agreed—what would her objection as an outsider accomplish?
When that moment came, she would dissolve her alliance with Thorin and head east on her own to find a homeland suitable for the people of Narnia.
The Balrog's head was somewhat oversized—half a person tall, horns and all. Putting it in her dimensional space would mean clearing out a lot of other things. She opted to just carry it by hand.
A flash of light. She teleported to the place where she and Thorin's company had separated.
"Where did these guys get to?" She called out into the mountain valley for quite some time. "Thorin? Balin? Kíli? Baggins?"
No answer.
She rubbed her forehead. This entire journey east had been one ordeal after another. Every time she stepped away, something happened to Thorin and company.
Nothing for it. She had to go find them.
Meanwhile, Thorin's company had run into monsters—or rather, into enemies.
After Bella and the Stone-giants had both disappeared, they had managed with great difficulty to find a narrow path through the mountain ravine and escape the zone where the Stone-giants were rampaging. A full day's hard march later, when they stopped to rest for the night, a trapdoor opened beneath their feet—and while many of the Dwarves were still asleep, they were captured by Goblins who lived in the world below.
Goblins shared some ancestral kinship with Orcs, but were greedier and considerably more stupid. Their low intelligence confined them to underground warrens, which made them universally scrawny—skin stretched over bone, a thoroughly unpleasant sight.
Ordinary Goblins were small and thin, but the Great Goblin was a different matter entirely. Within his tribe, he claimed first priority over all food, and the accumulated effect of years had transformed his large frame into something grotesquely bloated—a physique like a bull elephant.
When Thorin's company was brought before him, the Great Goblin burst into gleeful song.
"Crush their bones, wring their necks, string 'em up and beat 'em till they drop! Die down here in the dark, no one'll know, die in the deep where—"
He gyrated and pumped his fists with excitement, grease glistening on his multiple chins. His skin was brownish, his belly grotesquely distended—though he seemed entirely unaware of this—and he kept gleefully beating out a rhythm, already planning to trade Thorin's head to the Orcs for a reward.
"Kill them! Kill, kill!" The misshapen Great Goblin bellowed the order. Thorin's company fought back desperately, but the enemy vastly outnumbered them and they had no weapons. One by one, the Dwarves were beaten down.
A Goblin raised a crude dagger and drove it hard toward Thorin Oakenshield's throat.
Bang.
The Goblin's skull shattered like a rotten melon—blown apart on the spot.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Gunshots in rapid succession. In the time it took to blink, a corridor had been cleared through the enemy ranks in front of Thorin's company.
From a distance, Bella waved. "Over here! Get to me!"
"You changed your clothes?" Thorin noticed immediately that she'd gone from grey robes to white. "Is this some kind of omen?"
An omen? Really? Bella stared at him, utterly at a loss for words. She had absolutely no desire to get into this particular topic.
"Wait—what is that?!" Old Balin had spotted the Balrog's head she'd set to one side. The old Dwarf—visibly shaken in a way one rarely saw—actually shouldered Thorin aside, stammering incoherently and asking over and over what it was. "I must be seeing things. My eyes are going. That can't possibly be a—is that—?"
In the distance, the Goblins were already in pursuit, their numbers stretching beyond sight—a dense, crawling mass in every direction.
Bella had no time to explain. She had the stout Dwarf Bombur carry the Balrog's head, then cast a teleportation spell and shifted the entire company to a spot halfway up the mountain. There she finally sat down and told Balin what had happened over the past day and a half.
"Yesterday I got chased by a Stone-giant, right? Well—I was running, and I ended up following a mob of Orcs down into this underground city. You all know the place, don't you? Yes—that was the Mines of Moria…"